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Tuesday, November 15, 2016

In praise of literary festivals

I've mostly enjoyed literature and arts festivals and have learnt a lot through them. This year, I was invited to curate the Chandigarh Literature Festival. Here's the text of the speech I made at the opening:

Hello and welcome to
CLF 2016. This is a literature and arts festival. It showcases books,
screens and discusses films.

Over the last year
or so, I've met a few friends who roll their eyes and say, what?
Another litfest? Chandigarh has one? Two? Kasauli and Panchkula too?
A few years ago, the joke going around lit circles was that, any day
now, Gurgaon would have its own festival. Well, that happened too.
Some people wonder aloud, do we really need all these festivals? I
think that question is worth asking, and answering, every year.

You may have heard
that India is incredibly book hungry. We are also hungry in a lot of
other ways. A lot of people are hungry in the most literal sense of
the word. At least one fourth of our population is below the poverty
line, which is really the starvation line. More than half the nation
is just about getting by without the basic, assured minimum – good
diverse food, clean water, housing, medical aid, pension, terminal
life care. A decent education comes just a little bit higher on the
pyramid of needs. And books? Not schoolbooks, not books that help you
pass exams, but books that allow you to drink at the fount of life,
that let you grow into a fuller individual, someone who is better
informed about human history and the human soul, books that can help
you cope with a spiritual or economic crisis, books that attune you
to the changeability of friends, of systems, of borders and moral
boundaries, books that help you articulate the nameless terrors that
have hounded you since childhood, books that let your mind climb into
sky of possibility, books that comfort you when everyone else has
failed you – how many Indians have access to such books?

Ten percent? Five?
How many of us, once we have left school and college have access to a
decent library? How many villages have a free or subsidised library?
How many small towns have a good bookshop? How many bookshops in even
big cities like Chandigarh? How many car showrooms? Even cities where
there are a few good libraries tend not to have any outreach programs
that would help fortify the connect between citizens and books. A
library or bookshop is not a hospital, after all, where you go only
when something is wrong and you need it fixed. They are more like
parks for the mind – amusement parks, walking and jogging parks.
They help create a fitter, healthier citizenry. Festivals are a step
further along the same process of connecting books with citizens.

Those of us who are
here today, we are a tribe. Some of us may not have other essential
things – houses, cars or bikes, pensions – but we have books.
Some of you may be thinking now, well I can afford to buy more books,
but where is the time to read? Or you may be thinking, I don't read
that much but I love stories. I want to engage with new ideas. I want
to feel energised through knowing more, or being comforted by the
beauty and balance found in two lines of a ghazal.

When we show up at
literary events like this one, it is hard to say what we come looking
for, what we hope to gain, how it will transform us. Yet, we know
that words do have the power to transform. Our lives begin with a
word – a name – and all the history that is attached to it. We
become part of a larger community – a nation, a religion, a city,
an organization – through stories. Then we keep writing and
re-writing the narrative of who we are, where we are going, what we
have to do.

Words and stories
are not a luxury. They are critical to society. What is a luxury is
our access to more complex stories. To be able to swap ideas, to
challenge ideas, to hear people debating ideas in a safe and
respectful environment – that is a luxury. A literature and arts
festival provides that environment. This is why every town need its
own festival. The arts need to expand. The bridges between the
different arts need to be reinforced. For this, we need people to
participate in the conversation around books.

This is what the
Adab Foundation has been hoping to do over the last few years, and
the conversations and readings you hear over the next three days are
a step further along that road. I hope you will enjoy these
discussions and participate in them. Welcome once again.

4 comments:

I wanted to read this article because I am not fully convinced to 'why lit fests?', but a few weeks back I got my answer to 'why book fairs?' and i am pretty much convinced about that. so here's hoping if I don't have to travel all the way to Chandigarh, and a Lit Fest comes to my city, I will someday attend one and be convinced too. This article surely made me curious, and made me think.

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